Tag: Gay Catholics

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Inside the ‘glass closet’ of a gay Catholic teacher

By Alex Ryan
 

Being both gay and Catholic leads to a somewhat fraught existence. On one hand, we have our Catholic peers who, frequently, have trouble empathising with what it means to be ‘intrinsically disordered’. On the other, we have our queer friends who are, understandably, sceptical of our allegiance to an organisation that has a deep history of discrimination towards people like us.

 
This existence is further complicated for those of us who choose to partake in ministry that sees us employed by the Church.

I am a gay man and, also, a religion teacher in a Catholic school. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if my teaching days are numbered, particularly given Archbishop Denis Hart’s comments (reported, but since clarified) about Catholic organisations firing gay staff.

It’s the great unspoken rule of Church organisations that gay people must fly under the radar. A ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy is implied, but all of us are acutely aware we work in one of the few jobs not protected by anti-discrimination laws. This black cloud hangs over our every public action because, for some reason, teachers’ lives are something our communities feel entitled to know and talk about.

Whether it’s our social media posts, or even just holding our partner’s hand in public, we must carefully curate our outward appearance so as to not technically break Church rules, even if many of us live in a ‘glass closet’. Though we know it is unlikely we will be fired, we also know the potential is there if the wrong student or parent catches whiff of our supposedly un-Christian behaviour.

Last year I got my first long-term boyfriend since becoming a teacher. This was an exciting time for me, as it was part of embracing my queer identity. But what should have been a joyous occasion led to a great deal of anxiety. I had to explain to a man I cared about that, even though I wasn’t ashamed of him, I couldn’t risk listing him as my partner on Facebook. I was lucky that he was understanding, though it still hurt to explain it to him.

You may think this isn’t a big deal, but I would challenge the average person to go weeks, months, and years without mentioning any aspect of their love life to any coworker. The stress of hiding a major part of life is not insignificant; one wrong move and our livelihood is on the line. This is not to mention that, with the personal scrutiny school administration positions face, our career advancement opportunities in Catholic schools are limited.

People ask: ‘Why don’t you just move into the state system?’ It’s a fair question. But my answer is simple: I just don’t want to. I love working in a place where my faith is ingrained in the everyday routine; a place where Catholicism’s history and tradition are taught, explored and questioned.

Ever since I decided I wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to teach religion. Though it’s not my job to convert students, like in the old catechetical model of Catholic schools, I hope students can at least leave my classroom with an appreciation of how faith contributes to our world. I’m gay, but I’m also Catholic.

LGBTIQ+ people have a lot to contribute to our Catholic schools. To deny our students access to amazing teachers is surely a greater assault to ‘decency’ than what these teachers are doing in the privacy of their own homes. This, of course, leads to the question that many queer Catholics have about the institutional Church: Why is the same level of scrutiny not applied to our heterosexual colleagues?

I know a great many Church employees who live in open defiance of its teachings. People who are divorced, remarried without annulment, married outside the Church, cohabiting before marriage, have children out of marriage, or are engaging in premarital sex. I have also worked with many people who don’t even identify as Catholic. Surely if we are using adherence to Catholic belief as our yardstick for employability, then people who openly reject papal authority (e.g. Protestants), or reject belief in the Holy Trinity (eg. non-Christians) would fall short of the mark.

I’m not, of course, advocating that people in these groups should be excluded from employment in Catholic institutions — on the contrary. Rather, this is just to illustrate that to single out gay Catholic employees is to arbitrarily discriminate against an already vulnerable group. That, surely, would be a plank in the Church’s eye far bigger than the speck in mine.

Complete Article HERE!

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Majority of Catholics support same-sex marriage in Australia: Equality Campaign poll

A MAJORITY of Catholics, Christians and other religious people support gay marriage and will likely vote for it in the postal survey, according to a new poll.

marriage equality.jpg

The research shows 58 per cent of people of faith back the “yes” campaign, compared with 79 per cent of non-religious Australians.

Catholics and non-Christians were more likely to support same-sex marriage, with two thirds of both of those groups saying they were in favour.

The polling, commissioned by the Equality Campaign, was conducted last week by Jim Reed of Newgate Research who surveyed 1000 people online, Fairfax reports.

t comes as the Archbishop of Melbourne urged Catholics to vote against same-sex marriage “for the health and future” of society.

Denis Hart last week wrote an open letter urging Catholics to vote in the optional postal survey when forms go out in September.

“We sincerely believe that there is a core and fundamental wisdom and truth in the traditional definition and understanding of marriage that should not be ignored and is worth keeping for the health and future of our society,” he wrote.

He warned future gay marriage legislation could infringe rights of freedom of religion and conscience.

“It could result in restrictions on the right of ministers of religion and religious bodies and organisations having the freedom to teach, preach and speak about marriage between persons of the same sex being contrary to their religious or conscientious beliefs,” he wrote.

Archbishop Denis Hart
Archbishop Denis Hart urged Catholics to vote against same-sex marriage.

Archbishop Hart called for an “active and respectful” debate, urging Catholics to welcome gay Australians as brothers and sisters.

“Like all human beings they are created in the image and likeness of God,” he wrote. “They have a right to expect to be loved and welcomed and not subject to unjust discrimination.”

He told ABC radio on Wednesday homophobic material disseminated as part of the campaign against same-sex marriage was “totally inappropriate”, insisting both sides should express their ideas with conviction instead of creating a campaign of hate.

Meanwhile, a recent Newspoll found 67 per cent of respondents “definitely will” vote in the poll.

Fifteen per cent said they probably will fill out the ballot while three per cent are planning to abstain.

Support for same-sex marriage remains relatively unchanged from a survey last September, with 63 per cent of those polled saying they would vote “yes: — compared to 62 per cent a year ago.

Nearly half of the 1675 respondents say they support the postal ballot, similar to an Essential poll last week.

Complete Article HERE!

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St Bride’s RC Church praised for issuing strong public message on homosexuality

Catholic church in Cambuslang praised for issuing strong public message on homosexuality

By Aftab Ali

A Catholic church in Cambuslang has earned the admiration of thousands after issuing a strong public statement on its stance on homosexuality.

St Bride’s Roman Catholic Church in the town’s Greenlees Road took to its social media page on Sunday afternoon to insist that “all gay Catholics are accepted and welcomed in this parish.”

Endorsed by the head of the parish, Father Morton, the statement added: “Every single human person is loved by God and created to love by Him; this is a fundamental belief of our faith. No one is ever excluded from God’s love or his concern or his care or his plan for them.

St Bride’s Roman Catholic Church

“In God’s house, all are welcome and are the blessed and loved children of God. There should be no place in our language or our attitude which allows for prejudice or exclusion.”

Reaching out to anyone who is gay and wishes to speak with Father Morton, St Bride’s has urged them to head along for a talk.

“We must do everything we can to redress the harm that has been done in the past by the negative stance we seem to have taken up. We must join with others who are seeking to build a more inclusive society,” the statement added.

Father Morton’s message comes just two months after he issued a similar one in which he acknowledged how gay people feel “excluded” from the Catholic Church.

He added at the time: “We wish to emphasise in the strongest terms that we are a welcoming and inclusive parish.”

Yesterday’s message has gone down a storm on social media and is continuing to gather praise and positive reactions both at home and further afield.

“Fr Morton is such an amazing man. Lucky parish to have such a wonderful priest,” said one follower, while another added: “What a courageous statement. Hopefully others will follow this Christian lead. Time to stop burying our heads in the sand. Well done Fr Morton.”

The statement comes as religious leaders in Glasgow spearhead gay rights in the UK.

Just last week, St Mary’s Cathedral in the west end of the city became the first in Britain to confirm it has started taking bookings for same-sex weddings following a decision earlier this year in the Scottish Episcopal Church’s General Synod.

The Provost of the cathedral, the Very Rev Kelvin Holdsworth, said: “I want to live in a world where same-sex couples can feel safe walking down the street, hand in hand, and in which they can feel joy walking hand in hand down the aisle of a church too.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Why I Can’t Judge Gay Clergy

The story of one man I knew, and the uneasy secret he hid from the church he served.

By Kevin Moroso

“Police Broke Up a Drug-Fueled Vatican Priest Orgy.” You can’t make up a more sensational headline than that.

The story was originally reported on June 28 by the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. According to their anonymously-sourced report, when Vatican police were called to the apartment of Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, a secretary to an adviser to Pope Francis, they allegedly discovered hard drugs and a gay orgy in progress; Capozzi was said to have been swept off to a detox center outside Rome and faces misdemeanor drug charges.

The report is thinly-sourced, and thus far, Vatican officials have refused to confirm its validity. The Daily Beast was able to confirm that Capozzi no longer works at his old position, and an anonymous senior Vatican official confirmed to The Catholic Register that “multiple sources” have told them the story is true.

Less-than-stellar sourcing aside, the story spread like wildfire across social media, and many in the gay community were quick to shame and jeer Capozzi for his hypocrisy. My own Facebook feed was filled with friends ruthlessly mocking him, saying he deserved what he had coming. These are my same gay friends who are unabashedly proud and open about their wild sex lives, friends who have been to plenty of drug-fueled orgies themselves. But I didn’t have the same reaction, because the news reminded me of a lovely man I knew. He was nowhere near the corridors of the Church’s senior officials, and his case was markedly different from that of this secretary, but his story constantly reminds me that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge the sex lives of others—provided it involves consenting adults—no matter the person’s profession.

I went to a Catholic school, even though my family wasn’t Catholic or even Christian. It was run by a very conservative order, one that was incredibly strict and would later become notorious for child sex abuse. There was a parish nearby, unconnected to the school, and that lovely man was the priest there. I didn’t know him at all at the time; he would only occasionally come to school to lead mass, and my Catholic classmates would be sent to his parish periodically for confession.

It was only later in life that I would meet him and hear his story. He had blunt words to say about the men who ran my school: they were assholes and they were creepy. But it was how he came to lead that parish, and what happened next, that captivated me.

Father John* had joined a seminary when he was a teenager. He knew he was different from the other boys because he wasn’t interested in girls. But he had a sheltered upbringing, and given the era he grew up in, he interpreted his disinterest as a calling to join the priesthood, like many young men who felt similarly. Once he had completed his studies, he eventually traveled to Rome, became a full-fledged priest, and returned to Canada to lead a parish.

By that point he was an adult, no longer confined to a seminary, living in a society in the midst of a sexual revolution. He began to realize what made him different: he was gay. But he was too scared to leave the Church.

Pay within the priesthood can vary dramatically—the head of a gigantic American megachurch, for example, can make hundreds of thousands of dollars—but salaries, on average, tend to be small, just enough to cover expenses. Father John had no money of his own. He had no pension, because the Church would house and feed him when he got old. His only education was in theology. He told me he felt stuck. Plus, he enjoyed what he did. Pastoral care is quite like being a social worker, listening to people’s struggles and helping them find a way out. Ironically, he spent his life helping others with their problems without anyone to help him through his own. He never cast criticism on gays from the pulpit and preached only love. He wasn’t a hypocrite.

Secretly, he had sex with men. He’d meet them in the usual spots—parks, peepshows, and the like. He thought he could maintain these two lives separately, as many of us do, balancing a professional career with a sometimes debaucherous private side.

Then, one day, those two lives collided. He became very ill and went to the hospital. He was told he had AIDS. He knew this was a secret he couldn’t keep; the Church paid for his medical insurance, and it would be impossible to work while managing his illness. So he went to his bishop and told him his diagnosis. He wasn’t alone. Many priests acquired HIV and AIDS throughout the 80s and 90s.

The main job of a bishop is to provide pastoral care to his priests, but Father John’s sexuality precluded him from such goodwill. The bishop, John said, was going to do to him what he did to the others—he and his dirty little secret would be sent to a monastery to die alone, hidden from public view. For too long, the Church could simply shuffle pedophiles around and nobody would ever know (or at least they thought). But a priest who handed out communion with Karposi Sarcoma lesions? You can’t hide that from a parish.

Well, Father John was having none of it—he wasn’t going to disappear like the others. He had built up a network of other gay priests over time, and he contacted one, an Anglican who arranged a meeting with his bishop. The bishop told him not to worry. The Anglican Church recognizes Catholic priests, and he would gladly allow him to become a priest in an Anglican parish, doing what he did before as long as he was well, and whenever he got too sick, he’d be looked after.

I only got to know Father John after he’d made that switch. I met him through various religious activities of my own; at first, he was just another Anglican priest to me. It wasn’t until I randomly mentioned where I went to school one day that he revealed the parish where he once worked and we made the connection. He was always a bit sick—he had managed to survive AIDS, but his HIV treatment was never quite enough to make him well again. But, more importantly, his life was secure. He got the chance to continue to say mass, to visit the sick in their homes, to help people find their way, only now, he was able to do so as an openly gay man. He was in my life for a number of years until I moved away and lost touch. The last time I saw him, he was walking down the street, wearing his collar, on his way to give communion to an elderly lady who couldn’t leave her bed. He looked frail and struggled to remember things, but he still had a smile on his face.

Father John was luckier than most other gay Catholic priests. He was fortunate enough to have another denomination in his area that accepted gays, and accepted him. He had the courage to refuse the disgraceful end his first Bishop had in mind for him. He had an easy out.

Others aren’t so lucky, trapped by a choice made in their youth, as scared of the secular world as they are of the institution to which they’re beholden. One only imagines the cycle of despair that could arise. Instead of mocking gays in the Church, whether they’re having sex with other gay men or not, think of this guy instead. Struggling through life, as best he knew how.

Complete Article HERE!

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The way ahead for gay Catholics

Two years ago Cardinal Vincent Nichols asked me to be his liaison and chaplain to the Farm Street LGBT group in central London

by

Two years ago Cardinal Vincent Nichols asked me to be his liaison and chaplain to the Farm Street LGBT group in central London. That same week I was invited to be chaplain to the London chapter of Courage, an international support group. My work includes one-to-one spiritual guidance, helping with reflection days and accompanying both groups as an official representative of the Church.

Ministry to homosexual Catholics (transgenderism would need a separate article) takes place in two main contexts. First, groups like the Farm Street group set up by gay people themselves or their relatives, where everyone knows they are welcome, whatever their situation, and issues can be openly discussed. Such groups often later seek the support of their local bishop and priests.

Secondly, bishops or priests can set up groups themselves, and even obtain Vatican recognition, provided they are explicit in their adherence to Church teaching. Courage is such a group, set up by Fr John Harvey in America with the support of bishops there, and now present in several countries. Members describe themselves not as gay but as “experiencing same-sex attraction” and aim at lifelong sexual abstinence – but not at changing their sexual orientation.

Pastoral care of homosexual people is essentially the same as all ministry: seeking to communicate the unconditional love of Christ and his Church, and to accompany people on their journey towards holiness. But in practice this particular ministry encounters powerful feelings of pain and anger which can cause difficulties.

LGBT people often feel hurt by the Church, either because of the way its teaching comes across, or through concrete experiences of rejection, or both. Those from non-Western cultures are sometimes even in danger of their lives, while some other Catholics seem threatened by the very existence of gay people and react angrily towards attempts to accommodate them within the Church.

There is also a wide range of attitudes, experiences and behaviour among gay Catholics themselves. Some long for a permanent relationship, while others admit that relationships are not important for them, and they simply want sex. With the availability of gay websites and apps, and well-known pick-up spots, most gay people in our society can easily have sex whenever they want.

We sometimes meet men who had a lot of casual sex but came to realise it did not make them happy. They may then seek help in leading a chaste life. Courage provides them with a supportive group, modelled on twelve-step programmes, in which personal sharing enables exploration of the relationship between sexual desires and other aspects of life, and so helps mitigate the compulsive element which can easily affect sexual behaviour. Others are looking for a long-term relationship, but may go through several sexual partners in the search, sometimes remaining good friends with them after the sexual relationship has ended.

But one thing is common to virtually all LGBT Catholics today: they will not take the Church’s teaching on trust, but must learn from experience. Even those who hold a very traditional attitude have likely arrived at it through many experiences.

This being so, ministers to gay Catholics need two main resources: a moral theology that can face the critical scrutiny of life experience; and a well-grounded spirituality of discernment. These can help LGBT Catholics look honestly at their behaviour, see where it is leading them and discover alternatives where indicated.

The moral theology I have found most helpful in this ministry is that of the Belgian Dominican Servais Pinckaers, who shows that from biblical times to St Thomas Aquinas, Catholic moral theology was essentially based on the search for true happiness, on earth and in heaven, and on the cultivation of virtues leading to it – a happiness deeper than mere pleasure, and consisting above all in communion with God and his holy people.

A theology based on observing rules was a later distortion, and led by reaction in the 1960s to an equally unhelpful liberalism.

In Pinckaers’ perspective, moral theology does not just define what one is allowed to do, or the minimum one must do, but joins hands with spirituality in promoting the search for holiness through loving God and neighbour to the uttermost. Ignatian discernment of spirits is the obvious spiritual partner for such a theology.

Thus the most important gift the minister can offer LGBT people, after unconditional love and welcome, is encouragement to a deep spiritual life of friendship with Christ, based on the traditional practices of Mass, Confession, Adoration, Lectio Divina and the rosary. Without this, discernment loses itself in subjective states of mind; with it we begin to see which path leads to heaven and which to hell, and to marry personal experience with the wisdom of the Church.

Complete Article HERE!